Adventures in Baseball Archeology: the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, J-ball, the minors, the 19th century, and other hidden, overlooked, or unknown corners of baseball history...with occasional forays into other sports.

December 8, 2006

juan padrón

For the blog’s 100th post, here is a photo of Juan Padrón I found recently (La Lucha, October 6, 1918):

The heading reads: “A pitcher with a famous left arm.”

The caption reads: “Juan Padrón, the marvelous Cuban pitcher just returned from Mexico, who very probably will lend his valuable services to one of the clubs forming the National Professional League [the newly reorganized Cuban League].”

Figueredo has Luis Padrón as a pitcher/outfielder for Almendares in the 1918/19 Cuban League, which is interesting since Almendares was Juan’s team in 1915/16. Neither Padrón appeared in the special preseason series played in the fall of 1918 (Copa El Mundo and a couple of others); ditto for the few box scores I’ve so far collected for the 1918/19 regular season.

Compare these other photos of Luis and Juan, along with this one of Luis (he appears in the middle of the top row).

This does sound like a fantastic resource for Cuban players. One of my projects is to create accurate rosters for the various Cuban Stars in the U.S., especially for the 1900s and 1910s--this would be a great help.

I'm using Ancestry.Com to do a study of alien passenger records, census records, death records, and WWI draft registrations to gather data on Negro League ballplayers, and Luis Padrón shows up as born between 1878 and 1880 (close to the story you found).

Juan Padrón (or Padrone) has yet to show up in any passenger records from Cuba that I've researched, but is obviously not the same person. The younger Padrone reportedly resided in Michigan after his baseball career.

The passenger lists are a good source of information on the Cuban players. I'm trying to build a database to collect as much information as possible. I'll send you some as it develops.